Even Short Term Heat Waves Can Destroy Coffee Plants

The study was set up to see how leaf age and heat duration affected Coffea arabica’s resiliency to heat stress. To test this, various ages of C. arabica plants were subjected to heat that would raise their leaf temperatures to 120 degrees for a period of either 45 or 90 minutes. The researchers found that younger leaves were slower to recover from heat stress than those of older leaves, but that none of the plants exposed to either duration of heat were able to produce fruit.